Life is a lot easier when you don’t have to handle it all on your own. In fact, wouldn’t it be easier if everything was just done for you? Something just downloaded your files, sent your emails, responded to those pesky angry customers that just don’t understand? While they’re at it, bring you a new coffee and kick on your playlist to forget the stress.
Welcome back to #TechTuesdays my faithful reader! This week we’re going to delve deeper into the subject of automation with a service called Zapier.
Zap-ear? Zay-peer? What is this?
Zapier (pronounced Zappy-er, for reference!) is a service designed with the sole purpose in mind of efficiency and quality of life improvements for your typical business owner or busy body in life. This service accomplishes this exact thing by providing the ability to automate emails, manage social media and other similar accounts,a nda great deal more all while promising a minimalistic approach to intialization. Put simply, Zapier is automation for real life, taking everyday tasks and putting them onto a conveyor to allow you to focus your attention to what really matters; your business.
What does it do…and how?!
Through the auto-magical power of programming, whether you have the experience and technical skill or not, Zapier derives its functionality through a system of Cause and Effect situations to create a set of rules to act upon. Essentially, the ruleset acts, as an example, in the fashion of “If this happens, perform this/these actions in response”. This is done through a basic compution interface called an API (Appliocation Program Interface), which is a system used to allow programs to communicate with one another. An API acts as a “translator” of sorts to allow the applications that lack natural integration to communicate with one another. In a sense, while Application 1 speaks Korean, and Application 2 speaks British English, the API speaks both and translates them into commands that can be unified into a singular functionaity. This is the basic concept that Zapier functions upon.
So how Zapier manages to perform this functionality is through a system called “Zaps”. To put it simply, a Zap takes a parameter, such as receving an email with an attatchment, and converts this into a language that the next step of the programming cycle understands. So it takes something, such as receiving an EMail with a certain string of words in the subject for example, and forwards to the next action, such as marking it as spam or unsubscribing from mailing lists.
How deep does the rabbit hole go?
Zapier can be as complex or as simplistic as you, the end user, wants it to be. While there is a small learning curve at the very beginning, it takes only a few minutes to grasp even the more advanced feature set of the system. With integration with over 500 apps, such as popular social media, GMail, Outlook, Google Maps, Dropbox, and far more, the possibilities of integration are quite truly endless. Plus, for the time investment that you put into writing a “Zap” you are effectively saving countless extra hours in the long run by automating many of the day to day menial tasks. In a small business setting, we all know that every minute counts.
